Freedom: (Robin, Bruce Wayne, Rogue)
By D Benway
Synthesized from a coal tar residue by Dr. Benway.
Good day:
This is something that came to me after a night of fitful sleep. It is an unusual synthesis, as I am once again savaging an alternative Young Justice, but this time in Genosha. You don't really need to know that to follow the story, however. Many thanks to Tina S and Luba K for their editorial contributions, which have made the story comprehensible.
The main characters are as follows:
Robin Timothy Drake is a baseline human in the Sixth Form at the exclusive St. Ethelred's School. He is an orphan, and the ward of the reclusive industrialist Bruce Wayne, managing director of the Wayne-Bessemer Iron Works of Hammer Bay.
Colin Michael Elphinstone can bench press 10 tons and he can fly. He spent 5 years of his life inside a green suit with his mind switched, being used as a piece of construction machinery by the Genoshan magistracy. His life's ambition is to be from Santa Monica.
Cassandra Sandsberg is an American student, who attends the School while her mother investigates evidence of guest worker massacres during the 70s and 80s. Cassandra also can fly, and can bench press several more tons than Col can.
Bartholomew Allen went to the School for many years with Timothy, and spent the Troubles in a detention centre. He can move at great speed, and is experienced most often as a blur at the periphery of whatever is going on. He plays Minesweeper several thousand times a day, rather than engaging in conversation.
Cicely Goldsmith-Smith is an Anglican convert from Judaism who was disgraced by a minor scandal during the All Africa Games, after which her mother was imprisoned for attempting to fake a drug test. Cicely attends the School having received a scholarship from the Wayne Foundation, as did Col and Bartholomew. Robin attends through the proceeds from a trust left by his father.
Erik Lensherr is not dead, but is the president (for life?) of Genosha, now renamed the Hammer Bay Republic. His wife calls herself Irene Darkholme, and they have an infant daughter Aurora.
The Chosen were the followers of a religious cult that dominated the Hammer Bay Colony from its earliest days. It was founded by partly Anglicized Boers who found the Reformed Church to be far too relaxed and liberal, and who became disciples of a Brigham Young - like figure who established a de facto theocracy on the island that is described in greater detail in my earlier story, Naked.
Genosha is supposed to be near South Africa, and so I have ransacked South African and British political and social history for the setting. British subcultures in Africa did tend to be more English than the English, and retain many archaisms of language and culture long extinct in the British Isles. The School is one of these.
The description of the headquarters of the secret police in Part 3 may not be unrelated to my visit to the former headquarters of the Ministry for State Security in (East) Berlin in July of 2000.
After writing this, I became aware that it was strongly influenced by the film L'Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. This film was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes some years ago by a jury chaired by David Cronenberg, in spite of the shrieks of protest from Hollywood accountants.
Enjoy.
B
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